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How to Overcome Common Challenges with Email Marketing

Even though it has been around for a long time, email continues to be an important strategy to digital marketers. Not only does it commonly fetch the best return on investment among all online marketing channels, but it is also among the simplest to design and execute. However, there are a number of hurdles that need to be overcome before an email marketing campaign can be successfully implemented. Marketers, however, do not need to fret since there very simple solutions to the challenges.

1. Acquiring New Subscribers

According to recent studies, the biggest challenge facing marketers is that getting new subscribers to their emails. This is a radical shift from the earlier year when marketers perceived that their biggest challenge was in getting subscribers to click and open their emails.

The easiest and most effective way of overcoming this challenge is to be upfront and clear about what the potential benefits are that will accrue to subscribers.

Having a clear idea about the value that will be derived will enable you to address the most important concerns of potential subscribers.

You need to think really long and hard about why people should sign-up with you.

It is not a good idea to increase your subscriber base by purchasing subscribers; they will usually have no interest in your products and will not open your emails. It is best to grow your list organically by including a provision for opting-in on the website or by providing a sign-up button on your blog posts. Encouragement may be given by offering incentives like free samples or trials.

2. Boosting Open Rates

Even if marketers manage to acquire a large mailing list with effective and persuasive communication, the problem of getting subscribers to open the emails in their inboxes remains one of the biggest challenges.

To get a better rate of opening, you should compose subject lines that are crisp, compelling, relevant, and are imbued with a sense of urgency.

The subject line should be really persuasive as this is the first thing that an email recipient notice and bases his decision on for opening the email.

Another secret of getting better open rates is personalization in the subject line; addressing the recipient by name makes them feel special, and could boost the open rate by as much as 20%.

Conciseness is also important to recipients; subject lines that are short are easily understood and thus opened more frequently.

3. Improve Deliverability

Deliverability of emails is a big concern for contemporary digital marketers as spam filters have become more sensitive than before. Even the most compelling of emails cannot fulfill its task if it is consigned to the spam box, where the subscriber would normally never ever see it. Not only does a low deliverability rate translate to a waste of time, effort, and money, but also it can act as a signal to your ISP to block you.

The easiest way to avoid your email being labeled as spam is not to use words that trigger the spam filter such as buy, save $, earn $, click, cheap, free, unlimited, prize, cash, etc.

You can test out the deliverability concerns by using any of the tools commonly available and tweak your contents accordingly.

You can also ask some of the reputed bulk email marketing services in Mumbai for their advice on deliverability issues.

Make it a point to periodically remove recipients that never open your emails, or engage with you on the website. A process of email confirmation also can take care of people filling up incorrect or false email addresses when opting-in.

4. Subscriber Retention

You are not going to be able to grow your email lists substantially if your acquisition is being constantly eroded by subscribers opting out of your email marketing program.

It is very important that you make the effort to retain your subscribers.

Make sure that the email list is properly segmented so that you are sending out messages that are relevant to their interest.

Relevancy of emails leads to the unsubscribe rate falling by around 28%, according to studies.

5. Sub-Optimal Click-Through Rates

All efforts taken by marketers to compose emails with crisp subject lines, and relevant content will come to naught if even after opening the emails they are not reading the contents and clicking on the links contained within, and transacting.

The best way of getting on top is again by properly segmenting your email lists so that only subscribers who are really interested in a particular subject or product keep getting the emails.

Since nothing is ever constant, conduct a re-engagement exercise every year asking your subscribers to indicate whether they would want the email subscription to continue or would like to unsubscribe.

Another reason for low click-through could be because you are sending emails too frequently – it can be a good idea to permit recipients to set their ideal frequency.

Adapting a responsive design for your emails can make them easy to read on mobile devices. You could be a getting a low-click through if recipients are accessing their email on smartphones, and deleting them because they are unreadable, or taking too long to load.

Conclusion

As technology and customer behavior keep on evolving, it is quite likely that email marketers will keep facing newer challenges. However, by studying the problem intensively, solutions can almost always be found, and the success of your email marketing strategy can be preserved.

Author bio:

Samantha Philby is a digital marketing consultant working with GingerDomain.com, a specialist provider of online marketing services.